Theatrical Stage Research Articles

Effects of Chinese opera on the reproductions of Ibsen's plays

As part of a globalized phenomenon, the reproductions of Ibsen’s plays on the Chinese theatrical stage increasingly focus upon the exploration and expansion of new cultural forms, as Patrice Pavis defines interculturalism as “grasping the dialectical of exchanges of civilities between cultures”. However, how do we evaluate the effectiveness of the many “intercultural” productions that surround us today?I attempt to answer this question by comparing two Chinese reproductions of Ibsen’s plays that employ elements of Chinese opera on varying scales. The first one is a total transformation of Hedda Gabler into a Hangzhou yue opera form, Xin Bi Tian Gao (Aspirations Higher than the Sky, 心比天高) in 2006. As part of the yue opera tradition, Hedda Gabler was staged in an all-female cast. The second one is a fragmented insertion of a Peking opera excerpt into the staging of A Doll’s House by the National Experimental Theatre of China in 1998. One of the highlights of the play is a Norwegian actress, who plays Nora, singing and dancing a short Peking opera excerpt, thus replacing the tarantella dance in the original play. Contextualising the multiple perspectives towards interculturalism by Patrice Pavis, Richard Schechner and Rustom Bharucha, I aim to explore how the appropriation of Chinese opera in such performances might strengthen or weaken the reciprocal flows between the source and target cultures in Pavis’s “hourglass model”, and whether the initial attempt of revitalising both Chinese and Western art forms has backfired and misproduced Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect directed at the contemporary audience.

Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Mary Simonson (review)

Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. By Mary Simonson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [x, 278 p. ISBN 9780199898015 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780199898015 (paperback), $29.95; (e-book), various] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. In the summer of 1908, black choreographer, dancer, and singer Aida Overtoil Walker performed a dance on the stage of New York's Majestic Theater. Though her dance drew inspiration from the infamous striptease of Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salome, Walker's performance garnered praise for its modesty and artistry rather than its eroticism. While many turn-of-the-century dancers embodied the character as a means of escaping physical and social restrictions on stage, Mary Simonson suggests that, for Walker, Salome was alluring because of her connection with high art, opera, and respectability (p. 41). By subverting audiences' expectations for a dance, Walker sought to expand the ways in which she could articulate her identity as a black performer and, indeed, as a black woman. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, female artists turned to and a number of other figures, dances, and motifs to construct innovative, intermedial performances. By using the concept of intermediality, a term more often associated with postmodern arts and media, to frame her discussion of these turn-of-the-century performances, Simonson emphasizes the convergence of diverse genres and media in this much earlier era and, moreover, identifies the efforts of female performers in making such connections onstage and onscreen. Simonson's rich discussion of these creative women and their performances, which draws upon rare films, photographs, and other archival documents, as well as descriptions culled from over forty periodicals, offers a fresh perspective on early-twentieth-century American art and entertainment, arguing that the boundaries separating these worlds were much more permeable than many scholars have thus far acknowledged. But, as Simonson articulates in her prologue, Body Knowledge not just about intermedial performance; it is also an act of intermedial performance in and of itself (p. 26). Throughout the book, Simonson challenges longstanding scholarly narratives--especially those that have historically valued the work over its performance, the voice over the body, art over entertainment, and the live over the mediatized--in an effort to construct an interdisciplinary framework for future studies of performance. desire to rehabilitate performance as a meaningful subject of study in its own right--rather than as a lens through which to better understand a musical work--forms one of the driving forces of Simonson's project. In the first and sixth chapters, Simonson examines the intermedial reverberations of two operas that have garnered significant scholarly attention in recent years: Strauss's and Daniel Francois Esprit Auber's 1828 La muette de Portici. In her first chapter, Simonson argues that Walker, Gertrude Hoffmann, and Mary Garden turned to Salome's of the Seven Veils as a creative vehicle. Throughout her sixth chapter, Simonson again highlights the expressive potential of the dancing body in her discussion of the opera La muette di Portici and its film adaptation, this time with reference to Anna Pavlova's performance as Fenella in simultaneous stage and screen versions of the work. Crucial to both of these chapters is Simonson's effort to valorize embodied performance as an authoritative, creative act that rivals vocality and, indeed, the operatic work itself. One dancer's attempt to challenge composerly authority forms the topic of Simonson's third chapter. In a 1903 speech, The Dance of the Future, Isadora Duncan synthesized the ideas of Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and especially Richard Wagner as she outlined her artistic values and her outlook on dance's future developments. …

The birth of innovation

In January 1970, two hundred technology managers met at a secluded mansion in Glen Cove, Long Island. Their mission: to learn what it takes to be an innovator. From the comfort of their rooms, executives from the likes of AT&T, Honeywell, IBM, and 3M talked shop via closed-circuit television and telephone with leading entrepreneurs, science administrators, and academics, who paced the stage of an intimate theater as they wove parables about how their lives were changed by the accelerating rush of innovation. Each evening, the speakers again held court in the bar, where attendees were encouraged to seize the chance to ask the speaker just how an idea he has presented applies to your particular situation. · The workshop, for which participants paid the equivalent of US $3,000 today, was the brainchild of a new media start-up called Technology Communication. The weekend event captured the clublike exclusivity, expert insight, and collective self-help for revolutionary times that the new venture sought to embrace.

«La Musa Funambulesca». Apuntes en torno a "Otelo" entre Valle Inclán y Pasolini

A supposed adulteress, a jealous husband and a vengeance. What would happen if we transferred Othello’s tragedy to a puppet show? On the stage of a miserable theater, Pasolini displays in C he cosa sono le nuvole (1967) the story of some living puppets that are drawn to represent Shakespeare’s Othello on demand of an omn ipotent puppeteer. The audience’s answer will be unexpected. On the other hand, in Los cuernos de don Friolera (1930) Valle- Inclan masks his own Othello as a grotesque guardia civil trapped in the middle of rural, moral and despotic Spain; the story of whom is, again, seen by an audience, in this case, two intellectuals that reflect on art, posterity and triumph. Tragedy, disguised by laughter and fiction, exceeds the frontiers of tradit ional theatre to make us accomplices and, as Shakespeare would say, players. A game of Russian dolls that reminds us of the Foucaultian Meninas experience: us, the voyeurs, are effectively inside the scene, we finish the work of art. The funambulesque muse has played her game, and the theatrical stage has become a mirror.

Levitan Vitomila Zupana na gledališkem odru

The theatre staging of Vitomil Zupan’s novel Levitan (1982) is an area of the author’s creative work that has yet to be researched. In 1985, director Ljubiša Ristić adapted Zupan’s text on prison experience in collaboration with the Slovenian Youth Theatre company (Slovensko mladinsko gledališče). This literary adaptation is an example of the new postdramatic theatre approach to the staging of the (modern Slovenian) novel. The present paper investigates extraliterary and intraliterary elements of the process in which Zupan’s non-dramatic text is transferred to the theatre medium. As this collective creation came about without a fixed text, and simultaneously with Reality) (Resničnost), in some aspects the paper also refers comparatively to the novel by Lojze Kovačič and its staging.

중국 산시성(山西省)지역 관제묘건축의 지붕의장에 관한 연구

Shanxi province was the hometown of GuanDi. The analysis of community features that found in the roof of common GuanDi Temple show as follows: 1. There are many differences in the roof design of Door, Theater Stage, Pray Hall, Main Hall, Spring and Autumn Palace between Shanxi province and Henan province. 2. The Ornament on roof ridge mostly use patterns of dragon head and dragon tail in Shanxi province. The Ridge brake use various patterns in Shanxi province. 3. Deity carving appears in the Dragon ridge and Vertical ridge. Animal carving appears in the Dragon ridge, Vertical ridge and Descending ridge in Shanxi province. 4. Decorations such as Dragon carving, Peony blossom carving, Flowering plant carving and Word carving are used in the surface of Dragon ridge. Decorations such as Dragon carving and Peony blossom carving are used in the surface of Vertical ridge. Decorations such as Peony blossom carving and Flowering plant carving are used in the surface of Descending ridge.

Vajira - The First Professional Female Dancer of the Sinhalese Style

This article analyses the historical role of Vajira, the first professional female dancer of the classical Sinhalese style – the Kandyan dance. The focus is on how her life's work in training and presenting women on theatre stage in dances choreographed by her has largely influenced the modern culture of Sri Lanka. Vajira's extraordinary career is described, and her most important ballets, tours, and awards are named. The article describes in some detail some of her numerous contributions to modern dance training and highlights her role as teacher in the development of children's dance training techniques and children's ballet. Finally, it briefly presents the vision of the Chitrasena and Vajira Dance Foundation in 2014

Roddy Doyle’s the Commitments: A New Musical by Roddy Doyle, and: Teenage Kicks: A Punk Musical by Colin Bateman (review)

Reviewed by: Roddy Doyle’s the Commitments: A New Musicalby Roddy Doyle, and: Teenage Kicks: A Punk Musicalby Colin Bateman Mary Jo Lodge RODDY DOYLE’S THE COMMITMENTS: A NEW MUSICAL. Book by Roddy Doyle. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Choreographed by Ann Lee. Palace Theatre, London. 3November 2013. TEENAGE KICKS: A PUNK MUSICAL. Written by Colin Bateman. Directed by Des Kennedy. Choreographed by Jennifer Rooney. Co-produced by the Millennium Forum and the Nerve Centre. Millennium Forum, Derry, Northern Ireland. 6November 2013. In the autumn of 2013, two new stage musicals that explored the intersections of Irish identity in the 1980s with popular music, The Commitmentsand Teenage Kicks, premiered in the UK. Both experimented with the ways in which popular music forms rarely seen on the musical theatre stage—soul and punk—can be modified for dramatic performance. While the adaptation of popular music for the stage is as old as the art form of musical theatre, it is sometimes a tricky business, particularly when the adapted, nondramatic music is used to advance the plot, as it was in one of these new shows. The much higher profile of the two shows was the stage musical version of The Commitments, based on the popular 1987 novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who also co-wrote the screenplay for the successful 1991 film of the same name and serves as book writer for the stage musical. The Commitmentsmusical, directed by Jamie Lloyd, opened on the West End in London on 8 October 2013 and featured the same catalog of soul music made famous in the film. I attended the production on Sunday, 3 November, and while there were no fewer than four understudies appearing that night, including Thomas Snowdon in the role of Jimmy (normally performed by Denis Grindel) and Ian McIntosh, who played the demanding role of Deco every Sunday evening (played otherwise by Killian Donnelly), it was an enjoyably entertaining evening, although it often felt more like a musical revue than a book musical. The Commitmentsmusical follows the same plot as the previous film and book, exploring the lives of impoverished, working-class, young white men and a few white women from the rough northside of Dublin. It centers on Dubliner Jimmy Rabbitte’s formation of a band he dubs “The Commitments,” one that will exclusively play American soul music, typically associated with African American musicians, even though the entire band is white. The musical is not especially plot heavy and the story is told almost exclusively in the brief book scenes rather than through its adapted soul music. As in the film and book, The Commitments achieve a small degree of success in Dublin, much of which is depicted in a single concert that makes up the bulk of act 2, but their internal struggles with personality conflicts, romantic entanglements, and outsized egos eventually overwhelm the band. The show is primarily a musical celebration that includes an extended character study, particularly of driven band-manager Jimmy, as well as of Deco, the arrogant and difficult lead singer, and Joey “The Lips” Fagan, the philandering veteran musician who joins the young band. Unlike The Commitments, the other, smaller scale new UK musical, Teenage Kicks, premiered in Derry, Northern Ireland, on 1 November 2013 and was billed a “punk musical.” Teenage Kickswas written by Irish novelist and television writer Colin Bateman and featured punk music from the 1980s, particularly songs drawn from the catalogs of English band The Stranglers and Northern Irish bands Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones. It was created as part of the inaugural yearlong UK City of Culture celebration, which was held in Derry in 2013. During its first week I attended the show in Derry, and while the production lacked the big-budget punch of The Commitments, the talented cast offered strong performances, in spite of occasional script problems. Teenage Kicks, which attempted to use its adapted punk music to advance and develop its plot, is set in both Derry, Northern Ireland, and then Iowa, in America, in 1981. The Troubles—as the conflict in Northern Ireland between the Loyalists, who were mostly Protestant, and the Republicans...

영화로 각색된 󰡔햄릿󰡕의 유령

In film adaptations of Hamlet directors shorten speeches, give new substance to the original characters, and refashion genres, but they are most wary of changing Shakespeare’s words. Each of the directors tries to create uncommon visual and sound styles to give a powerful rendition of the Ghost. My aim is to show how the Ghost’s transformation is effected visually through seven notable Hamlet films directed by Laurence Olivier, Tony Richardson, Grigori Kozintsev, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Almereyda, and Campbell Scott. The Ghost, the figure of the former king, is the most effective Shakespearean character, for he plays a central role in the first act and his speeches propel action. Many textual critics have put the ghost’s provenance and authenticity in question. In film versions, however, each director transforms the “questionable” shape of the Ghost to concrete visual image undeniably present without posing an epistemological dilemma for the audience. In textual criticism the problem of the Ghost’s authenticity(whether the Ghost is a “spirit of health or goblin damn’d”) has been connected to Hamlet’s own dilemma. And moreover, while urging to take revenge for his unnatural death and to cleanse the royal bed of incest, the Ghost expressly admonishes Hamlet not to taint his mind and not to contrive in any way against his mother. Thus the contradictory nature of the Ghost’s injunctions has been regarded as another motivating factor of Hamlet’s delay of revenge as well. But film directors do not take pains to visualize the source of Hamlet’s turmoil which is, in most cases, caused by a rational solution(the veracity of the Ghost) or a moral solution(the propriety of revenge). The Ghost in the cinema dominates his son, who occupies a position of submission to see the Ghost’s words in his mind’s eye. Hamlet films mostly give rise to questions of paternity, for the Ghost, who haunts Hamlet’s psyche and controls him as well. Film directors, who pay no heed to the Ghost’s authenticity or credibility, show a disposition to represent the poisoning in Act III scene ii not for evidentiary reasons to test the authenticity of the Ghost but for a re-enactment of the Ghost’s story. Hamlet seems to put on “The Mousetrap” to seek independent verification of Claudius’s guilt on the basis of the Ghost’s revelation. And in contrast to a single level of perceptible reality in theatre stage film directors make efforts to create the different visions of the Ghost’s presence through the eyes of Hamlet and his mother in the scene of Gertrude’s chamber. At the close of the film directors have an inclination to present Hamlet who would like to tell his own story but like the Ghost lacks time, or who has been released through death from the burden of the Ghost. Each director, indulging in ‘ghostings’ of Shakespearean traditions, tries to bring Shakespeare to large contemporary cinema audiences in exciting and innovative ways. Tropically the Ghost is a metonymy for the cultural heritage of Shakespeare.

Staging Entrapment in Mexico City

Five actors move around an almost empty theater stage carrying ubiquitous gray building bricks; they are costumed in jeans, skirts, shirts, and blouses that have been dyed to produce a whitish mottled coloring, as if covered in brick dust from construction work. Gradually, at center-front stage, they collectively construct a single-layer square platform of bricks—a stage on a stage. Standing side by side behind the square of bricks, the actors leap into the air in unison, gesturing upward. Together they take a step onto the brick stage, facing the audience square on. > —It was the day of the fiesta of our lord Huitzilopochtli. We were celebrating in the temple…. The plaza was full of people … > —There were snipers on the roofs. > —Those who were going to kill us covered one hand with a white glove. > —Suddenly there was a gunshot in the distance. We didn’t know where it came from. > —“Get down!” someone shouted. “They’re going to kill us!” > — They closed the eagle entrance in the smaller palace … and when it was closed, they all took their positions. > —The plaza was a mousetrap. The actors gaze out into the darkness of the auditorium, staring directly at the audience, as intensive bright lights shine in their faces, illuminating expressions of fear and terror. Pressed together they form a tight cluster of bodies. Standing huddled, the bodies push, touch, crouch, and lean sideways, falling … falling as one body, in slow motion, bodies contorted, awkward, one on top of the other, heads falling slowly down to the ground. > —I remember perfectly the blood running down the forehead of someone who was by my side. > —I had blood in the sides of my shoes, in the hem of my dress. > —“Everyone against the wall! Everyone on the ground, and whoever …

Performing blackness in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark

This paper investigates the theatrical stage both as a walled-in space where ethnic difference can be safely experienced and consumed, and as a gateway for black performers to achieve public visibility and recognition as appears in Caryl Phillips’s novel Dancing in the Dark (2005). Phillips’s main character puts blackface on his own black skin to handle what Edward Said would name the “anxious power” of performance; this power becomes, in Phillips’s own postcolonial rereading, a device to expose the performativity of racial borders and gateways. Here, the theatrical curtain works as a gateway to acceptance and, in some cases, integration; yet it also becomes a wall enclosing the performer in her/his own performance of “the Other”.

Cirque du Soleil and Its Roots in Illegitimate Circus

Cirque du Soleil and Its Roots in Illegitimate Circus

Treading the Boards: the Significance of Walking on the Stage

In this article Kris Darby examines the significance of walking on the theatre stage, responding to the growth of pedestrian performance as an area of research. He seeks to provide a point of expansion for a field that is still largely concerned with site-specific works where audiences walk during the performance. Beginning with a discussion of the possible reasons for the neglect of walking on stage, the author addresses the prominence of walking and the journey as a rehearsal tool employed by a wealth of practitioners. As further justification for the inclusion of the stage in pedestrian performance research, a series of historical case studies is presented which spans over a century of theatrical history, and includes an examination of the audience's pilgrimage to Richard Wagner's Parsifal (1882) and the ‘epic flow“ of Erwin Piscator's treadmill in Good Soldier Schwejk (1927). The significance of walking in Samuel Beckett's life is also explored through the ‘inward walking’ of Footfalls (1976), and the proscenium staging of Matthew Earnest's Wanderlust (2010) is made significant through its critique of supermodernity. The author concludes by arguing that an immobile audience can kinaesthetically empathize with the performers, embarking on their own internalized journey within the theatre. Kris Darby is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Drama at Liverpool Hope, whose research interests concern the relationship between walking and performance.

Shaping Shiʿa Identities in Contemporary Indonesia between Local Tradition and Foreign Orthodoxy

This article reflects on the impact of transnational flows of students, pilgrims, and literature from Iran to Indonesia on the shaping of Shiʿa Islam in Indonesia since 1979, with a focus on the post-Suharto era (1998–2012) and the performance of ʿ Āshūrāʾ commemorative rituals. Since the early days of its Islamization, Southeast Asia has featured several literary and ritual practices rooted in a combination of Islamic and local traditions; most notable are those expressing patterns of pre-sectarian devotion towards the ahl al-bayt – drawing a parallel with Marshall Hodgson’s framework of ʿAlid piety (1955). Based on ethnographic and archival research, the author suggests that in the decades following the Iranian revolution some of these practices were abandoned in favour of a paradigm of devotion promoted by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The polarization of practices, and the relationship between organizations representative of these two approaches, is illustrated through an analysis of the performative means used to represent the tragedy of Karbala during ʿĀshūrāʾ events in Bandung, Bengkulu (West Sumatra), and Jakarta in 2011. In Bandung the play “Tragedi Karbala” was performed by a Sundanese theatrical group staging a local text; in Bengkulu the traditional Festival Tabot took place following a pattern determined by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture in the early 1970s but now under the sponsorship of the Iranian Embassy; the Jakarta event featured a taʿziya troupe brought from Iran by the Embassy’s cultural office.

The synaptic challenge

The synaptic challenge

The Theatrical Stage as Accident Site in Professional Dance

Reducing work-related health hazards at the different theatre workplaces is one aspect of preventive options in professional dance. This also applies to hazards on the highly variable theatrical stage areas. However, detailed information on these stages and their risks is not available. The aim of this study was to analyze and evaluate work-related traumatic injuries in the stage area. The basis for the evaluation was accident reports, from the German National Statutory Insurance, of work-related traumatic injuries occurring on stage in professional dancers (n=790: 407 males, 383 females) over a 17-year period (1995-2011). Most (79.4%) of the accidents on stage occurred during an ongoing performance (frequency: 10.1/100 performances), with only 19.7% occurring during rehearsals on stage (p<0.001). Due to the sustained injury, 30.2% of the dancers sustained a time-loss injury. Most (57.7%) of the injured dancers were older than 25 years. Of the accidents, 59.3% were initiated by a definably extrinsic cause, with 40.7% caused by intrinsic factors (p<0.001). Injuries were most commonly caused by the "partner" (21.7%) or "floor" (21.0%). The lower extremity was the most commonly affected body region (63.6%) (p<0.001). Stage performances seem to carry an increased injury risk compared to rehearsals. The "risk" of on-stage work is spread across various factors that seem to be stage-specific. There is a need for further qualitative and quantitative research to be able to classify the stage as workplace more precisely.

Tribute to Gilles Veinstein

Prof. Gilles Veinstein, Chair of Turkish and Ottoman History from 1999 to 2012 Gilles Veinstein was born on 18 July 1945 in Paris. His father was a lawyer in Grasse, but soon embarked on a new career by doing a PhD on the history of theatrical staging, which allowed him to enter the CNRS and become a librarian at the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal. He was also a university lecturer. His mother worked at the Ministry of Culture and was a recognized specialist on Paul Claudel and Jules Romain. Gil...

Editorial Comment: Neoliberal and Other Scandals

Editorial Comment:Neoliberal and Other Scandals Ric Knowles Editorial introductions to general issues always seem to me a bit like those creative writing exercises in which students are given a list of disparate items and asked to make a coherent story out of them. Many of the items involved in the current exercise, of course, are very serious, and I have no wish to trivialize them. The list includes: the inner parlors of seventeenth-century Venetian convents and the gates of hell (no problem linking them); the rights and rules of standup comedy (one could probably fit those in as well); a musical and a video game about Japanese American internment (offering both more difficulty and more seriousness); horizontalist performance in reconstruction Buenos Aires; and, perhaps most shockingly, the bodies of suicidal workers caught in nets at the Foxconn electronic factories in China. But the issue opens promisingly with “This is a story . . .,” and perhaps what holds the story of this issue together is scandal. The story that Shannon Steen introduces at the outset of the issue, “Neoliberal Scandals: Foxconn, Mike Daisey, and the Turn Toward Nonfiction Drama,” indeed tells disturbingly of two scandals, one involving the 2010 worker suicides at Foxconn (supplier to Apple and other electronics giants) and the other the fabrication of facts related to the working conditions that caused those suicides by Mike Daisey in his “nonfiction” play, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, together with Daisey’s forced performance of confession on Ira Glass’s television show, This American Life. Steen’s goal is to demonstrate the ways in which these two performative scandals are linked to, and illuminate, contemporary neoliberal systems of governmentality. What her essay proceeds to offer is an acute exploration of what she calls “four distinct modes of neoliberalism’s theatrical life”: its use of the performative as a mode of seduction, as exemplified by Apple’s “think different” advertising campaign (“Act innovatively! Act independently”); new and extreme forms of protest required by its emergence (“suicide as protest performance”); the role of scandal in shoring up its domain of expression (“the disruption of truth and fiction”); and “its surprising manifestation in nonfiction theatrical forms created with the goal of its critical evaluation.” What she convincingly argues is that “[p]erformance . . . does not merely exist alongside neoliberalism, but it forms a core repertoire through which neoliberalism is activated and moves from ideological project to material reality.” Christine Scippa Bhasin’s “Prostitutes, Nuns, Actresses: Breaking the Convent Wall in Seventeenth-Century Venice” deals with different sorts of scandal in a different time period altogether. Bhasin writes about the scandalous and technically banned public, often secular performances by prostitutes-turned-nuns in Republican Venice. The actors in these performances had been equally scandalously abandoned by their consorts and confined, along with the “excess daughters” of aristocratic families, to nunneries, which included the “Convertite,” an Augustinian monastery founded in 1530 where “repentant prostitutes” took mandatory vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. As Bhasin notes, her story complicates “received notions of the actress-as-prostitute through the historical reality of prostitutes turned nuns-as-actresses.” The nuns played roles ranging from virgin martyrs to “fallen women” in plays written by the major (male) playwrights of the day, they cross-dressed (at a time when their professional counterpoints could not), and they performed before both men and women, including upper-class patrons and foreign visitors who were seasoned theatregoers. They themselves occasionally “escaped the cloister” to attend the professional theatre elsewhere, and they hosted professional performers in their own parlors. Bhasin’s essay tracks some of these activities, but it also provides, for the first time, evidence of some of the plays performed by these nuns: sacred plays, comedies, tragedies, morality plays, and musicals by the likes of Luigi Grotto, Francesco Coli, Fabio Glissenti, and Giacinto Andrea Cicognini that often reflected, sometimes ironically, on the prostitutes-turned-nuns’ own positions and lives. Bhasin also argues convincingly for the use of the [End Page ix] convents’ inner parlors as performance spaces, with spectators gazing at them from the outer parlors through their grated windows (recalling both the typical theatrical staging of the plays of Plautus and...

The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages ed. by Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, and Kathryn A. Smith (review)

Reviewed by: The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages ed. by Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, and Kathryn A. Smith Rebecca Lyons Coleman, Joyce, Mark Cruse, and Kathryn A. Smith, eds, The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 21), Turnhout, Brepols, 2013; hardback; pp. xxiv, 552; 9 colour, 135 b/w illustrations, 1 b/w line art; R.R.P. €130.00; ISBN 9782503532127. This attractive and illustrated, edited volume of fifteen essays offers an interdisciplinary perspective on manuscript illumination, traversing English, French, literary studies, and art history. Divided into Part I, Spiritual Community, and Part II, Social and Political Community, the book spans a range of manuscripts and texts – secular and religious, French and English – that were patronised, owned, and read during the later Middle Ages, mostly by high-status individuals. Part I opens with three essays that approach religious imagery in the context of a physical, spiritual, and intellectual connection between [End Page 155] manuscript contents and readers. In her consideration of Christ’s blood as ink, Marlene Villalobos Hennessy suggests ‘a relationship between the book and the body that is inherently social’ (p. 18), while Alixe Bovey in her essay on the Smithfield Decretals argues that manuscript illustrations deepened lay readers’ understanding of the Eucharist. Finally, Lucy Freeman Sandler builds upon work by Michael Camille to examine the imagery of two Old Testament cycles and their relationship with written text in the Psalters of Humphrey de Bohun. Kathryn A. Smith and David Joseph Wrisley go on to investigate the communities and social contexts surrounding illustrations. Smith considers a book of hours and a group of English wall paintings in terms of their ‘viewing communities’ and the ‘communication technologies’ that help to forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals (p. 122), while Wrisley’s study on Jean Germain’s Debat du Crestien et du Sarrasin references the late medieval debate around papal authority. Part I closes on two studies of richly illuminated playscripts. Robert L. A. Clark and Pamela Sheingorn point to the social function of the Arras Passion manuscript, despite the removal of this and other such luxury books from any theatrical staging, while Laura Weigert considers aspects of marketing and genre suggested by the images in Anthoine Vérard’s La vengeance de nostre seigneur. Part II opens with two thoughtful analyses of the effects of image placement in the mise en page. Logan E. Whalen considers how page design might influence representation and reception of moral instruction in Marie de France’s Isopet, and Nancy Freeman Regalado highlights an illustration in Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), MS fr. 146 that ‘marks a crucial point of encounter’ between text, music, image, and the social (p. 316). Anne D. Hedeman and Mark Cruse both highlight the performativity of illustration, with Hedeman examining legal and historical documents in the Procès de Robert d’Artois (BnF, MS fr. 18437) and Charles V’s Grandes chroniques de France (BnF, MS fr. 2813), whereas Cruse assesses the function of image in romance in the Roman d’Alexandre of Oxford, MS Bodleian 264. The collection’s next two articles explore the relationships between genre, content, and image. Joyce Coleman postulates that presentation miniatures were restricted to didactic texts, and Dhira B. Mahoney cites the power of illustration to ‘make the book, fluid in itself, a constantly changing literary artefact’ in three versions of Anthony Woodville’s Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (p. 465). The collection closes on two studies of books owned by high-status women. An opulent prayer book from James IV to his new bride Margaret Tudor provides the subject of Elizabeth Morrison’s study of marriage, politics, and iconography, and Mary Erler argues that inscriptions in books are ‘carriers of social meaning’, citing a book of hours owned by Jane Guildford (p. 529). [End Page 156] In their Introduction, the volume’s editors describe illustrated manuscripts as ‘associative objects’, creating and shaping social bonds (p. 2). This agency has certainly forged illuminating links between manuscripts, themes, and issues in this wide-ranging collection. The volume presents...

Theatrical Life of Documents

The notion that documents provide incontrovertible evidence has long been in question. Yet documents, in both their material and digital forms, are still well respected and are used as sources of information with consequences for the creation of meaning in historical accounts, in legal procedures, and on theatre stages. The theatrical life of documents may or may not contain anything real, in the sense of actual, physical, factual, or material. What is the document, what is its province, and what kinds of meanings does the way in which it is staged produce? I will address these questions in relation to three international performances: Double Edge Theatre’s The Grand Parade directed by Stacy Klein (2013), The Year I Was Born (2010), and The Pixelated Revolution (2011).